my first manual focus experience

[PentaxK5ian]

these are from my first manual focus lens samyang 14mm f2.8.
expecting your comments.

[Bobobird]

1 and 4 take the cake. Beautifully done shots and the b/w conversion looks really good. Congrats on the first try. Now with this sort of stuff being the first shots am wondering how you will better them in later use of that lens.

I also like how you used the vertical orientation. My limited experience with wide angles is that there is less "toppling in" effect if the lens is used vertically.

[rpcrowe]

I also like how you used the vertical orientation. My limited experience with wide angles is that there is less "toppling in" effect if the lens is used vertically.

The "toppling in" effect as you call it is caused by the sensor or film plane not being parallel to the subject. Most often the subject is a building, as the camera is pointed up...

Obviously the camera covers a wider left to right field of view when it is in the horizontal or landscape position. When you switch to a vertical or portrait position, the camera provides a wider top-to-bottom field of view.

The portrait position, allowing for a greater top to bottom coverage, often necessitates less tilting to cover the top to bottom of an image and, thus leads to less perspective distortion.

Here is another totally unproven suspicion. When I shoot in the horizontal position, it seems easier to tilt the camera up without realizing it. In order to tilt the camera in the vertical position, I have to make a concentrated effort to do so.

Try it with your own camera. Look through the viewfinder with your camera in the landscape position and tilted slightly up. Now, switch to the portrait position and aim your camera up at approximately the same angle as you were viewing in the horizontal position. Doesn't the angle of the camera seem more exaggerated in the portrait position than it does in the horizontal positoon. It does to me anyway.

Luckily we, as digital photographers, can correct the perspective distortion quite easily in post processing. Most editing programs have a way to adjust this distortion. Photoshop CS-5 and Photoshop Elements-10 (I don't know about earlier versions) have content aware fill which can often help fill in blank areas of your image when you are corpping after correcting the perspective distortion.

An annoying bit of perspective distortion, to me, is when a photographer (especially a tall photographer) shoots a person from a rather close distance using a wide angle lens and an eye level viewfinder. This distortion results in a rather large head and upper body and small spindly legs.

I am 6'2" tall; a bit above average in height. When I shot people using a twin lens reflex camera or a Hasselblad SLR; I held he camera in a lower position and my shots of people actually looked better than when I shoot close up with a DSLR at eye level. That is because the camera was not pointed down at quite the same angle. A right angle finder or crouching down a bit will often help me get the camera at a better angle for close up people shots with my DSLR.

[Bobobird]

Thanks Richard for the great explanation. I will bear that in mind.

What I found most annoying was taking a panorama with a wide-angle. Literally every pic in the sequence needed perspective correction. The extra effort was worth it but was it a pita!!!

[rpcrowe]

Bobo, a w/a lens is nothe best tool for a panorama due to the poblems you ecountered. Try shooting a pano with the camera in a vertical/portrait position. That way you can use a longer focal length lens and get the same top to bottom field of view. The left to right coverage is simply predicated on the number of exposures you are willing to stitch together. An example of this would be that the top to bottom coverage on a full frame camera of a 35mm lens in the landscape position is less than the top to bottom coverage of a 50mm lens shot in the portrait position. I just picked these two focal lengths off at random. The differences in coverage are across the board in that the longer focal lengths can be effectively used in the portrait position for panos and they don't produce as much distortion.

NOTE: Using a camera on a standard ball head to shoot a pano in the portrait position is not efficient since in order to be placed in the vertical position the camera must be cantilevered over to ths side. It will then not rotate around a center point.
You can solve this problem by using an L bracket such as the RRS L bracket or by using a specialized pano tool such as the Pansourus.